CVDI Facilities and Resources at Stony Brook University

Researchers in the Center for Visual & Decision Informatics will conduct their studies in the Department of Computer Science (CS) and the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) at Stony Brook University (SBU).

Department of Computer Science

Research activities in the department are primarily conducted in the new computer science building which opened in July 2015 and is designed to meet LEED Silver certification. The new facility is comprised of a total of 70,000 square feet and consists of 20,000 square feet dedicated to 18 research labs and two wireless teaching labs.

The new CS building is able to support multiple applications through a high tech CAT7a cable sharing infrastructure, which received the 2015 Cabling Innovators Award. The TERA CAT 7a (Class FA) Cabling System from Siemon is capable of 10-Gigabit Ethernet at 100 meters and is the highest grade of cabling currently supported.

All of the research laboratories, including an additional 7,000 square feet in the former computer science building, are interconnected by a 20Gbps mesh backbone and the department has aggregated 1Gb full-duplex connections to the campus network. SBU has multiple load balanced high-speed connections to the Internet, capable of greater than 1 GB throughput, and a 10 GB connection to Internet II. Additionally, the department maintains its own 802.11ac wireless infrastructure providing connectivity throughout both the new and old computer science buildings. The general department computing facilities contain over 250 computer systems including a variety of compute servers, laptops and workstations running all of the popular operating systems. There is plenty of general data storage, a departmental web server, and numerous printing facilities available.

Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT)

Space and computing resources are available to computer science faculty and students in CEWIT, a $250M government/industry/academic partnership awarded to SBU in 2001. CEWIT offers 100,000 square feet of lab and incubator space and has 15,000 square feet of active R&D lab space on the main campus. The CEWIT cluster includes 300 Dell PowerEdge 1800, 1425 and 2850 systems with 450 CPUs total, 1-4GB ram in each system and a total of 100TB of storage. There are three HP Proliant 585 parallel systems with 32-64GB ram in each system to support large-memory computing and simulations. All of the CEWIT cluster systems are interconnected on a 10Gbs backbone with a 1Gbs connection to each system and use ROCKS cluster software.

Other research labs at CEWIT focus on big data, machine learning, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and data mining, and CEWIT is home to the CS department’s Immersive Cabin and Reality Deck. The Immersive Cabin, which is a self-designed active stereo projection system, consists of: four projection walls and a projection floor, active stereo projector pairs; and computers with GPUs to drive the projectors. The Reality Deck is a large room-sized (40’x30’x11’) gigapixel immersive environment capable of approaching the visual acuity of the human eye by providing over 1.5 billion pixels.